One of many hardest issues to reconcile about dwelling within the American South is how this area of extraordinary pure magnificence, this still-wild place of irreplaceable biodiversity, is generally within the arms of politicians who will gladly promote it to the very best bidder. It’s laborious to reconcile how even land that’s ostensibly protected is never truly safe. And the way state regulators charged with defending it would usually look the opposite approach when the very best bidder violates the state’s own environmental regulations.
An egregious instance of this sample is unfolding now in Georgia, the place state officers are poised to approve a strip mine on the southeastern fringe of the magnificent Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.
At 407,000 acres, the Okefenokee is the biggest ecologically intact blackwater swamp in North America and the biggest Nationwide Wildlife Refuge east of the Mississippi River. It hosts or shelters a huge range of plant and animal life, together with endangered and threatened species. It’s a essential approach station for migratory birds. Designated a Wetland of Worldwide Significance underneath the RAMSAR Conference of 1971, it sequesters an immense quantity of carbon in the form of peat.
The proposed mine poses a profound danger to the swamp. Path Ridge, the location the place Twin Pines Minerals will start operations, is a geological formation that capabilities as a low earthen dam holding the waters of the Okefenokee in place. The mine would take away the topsoil, dig out the sand pits, separate the titanium from the sand, after which return sand and soil to some approximation of their unique place. To handle all this, Twin Pines would wish to pump 1.4 million gallons of groundwater a day from the aquifer that serves the Okefenokee.
It doesn’t sound too dangerous, I assume, until you already know that this destroy-extract-replace plan is successfully mountaintop-removal mining transferred to the watery lowlands. There is no such thing as a restoring an ecosystem after an assault like that. Aquatic crops and animals die off if waterways turn out to be clogged with silt. Consuming water will be contaminated by heavy metals. Historical land formations and the habitats they underpin are misplaced without end. The dwelling soil is left barren.
As a species, we now have by no means let ecological necessity get in the best way of one thing we predict we’d like from the land. Factor is, we don’t want this mine. Titanium dioxide is used primarily as pigment in a variety of merchandise, together with paint and toothpaste. It’s not tough to seek out in much less environmentally delicate areas.
Twin Pines, an Alabama firm, claims that its proposed mine would convey lots of of much-needed jobs to an economically depressed a part of the state. It doesn’t say how a lot revenue can be misplaced if the mine depresses tourism to this ethereal place, which annually attracts greater than 800,000 guests who spend some $91.5 million whereas they’re there. Okefenokee tourism “helps 750 jobs, $79 million in financial output, and $11.1 million in annual tax income within the space,” notes an analysis by The Conservation Fund.
Even by a purely human measure, in different phrases, there isn’t a compelling cause for Georgia to permit mining on a fragile ridge of land lower than three miles from the Okefenokee Swamp.
By environmental measures, in fact, establishing a strip mine wherever close to this wildlife sanctuary must be flat-out unlawful. Arguably, it already is. Hydrologists on the Nationwide Park Service final yr discovered “critical shortcomings” within the mannequin Twin Pines used to display the security of its plan — a mannequin which “obfuscates the true impacts from mining on the refuge.”
It’s vital to notice that this isn’t a battle between the folks of Georgia and a few out-of-state environmental organizations who don’t perceive the dynamics of rural poverty. The folks of Georgia treasure the Okefenokee. When I wrote about this risk to the swamp final yr, the primary interval of public remark was coming to an in depth, and sentiment was already clear: 69 p.c of Georgians supported completely defending the swamp from growth, and Georgia’s Environmental Safety Division acquired more than 200,000 public responses opposing the mine.
What the folks of Georgia know — which Georgia environmental regulators refuse to acknowledge — is that we should always react as fiercely to the concept of a mine on the sting of the Okefenokee as we’d to “any motion that jeopardizes the integrity of one thing like Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon,” Invoice Sapp, a senior legal professional with the Southern Environmental Regulation Heart, told Brady Dennis of the Washington Post. As an alternative of handing it over to some out-of-state firm to revenue from, Georgia officers should be defending this swamp with each software they’ve at hand.
However, on Feb. 9, simply days after I wrote an essay about the danger to American wetlands on the whole and to the Okefenokee particularly, Georgia’s Environmental Safety Division — don’t even get me began on the irony — issued draft permits for the mine.
Right here’s one other irony for you, courtesy of reporting by The Associated Press’s Russ Bynum: “The draft permits had been launched barely two weeks after Twin Pines agreed to pay a $20,000 fine ordered by Georgia regulators, who mentioned the corporate violated state legal guidelines whereas amassing soil samples for its allow software.” To place this sequence of occasions one other approach, Georgia’s Environmental Safety Division gave the corporate a slap on the wrist after which threw it a parade.
How is it even doable that state regulators are on the cusp of approving an pointless mine on the boundary of a desperately wanted federal wildlife sanctuary? A mine that the state’s personal residents, together with a bipartisan majority of its lawmakers, so vehemently oppose? In a comprehensive report for The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Drew Kann lays out the function that lobbying efforts and marketing campaign donations — and a devastating rollback of environmental protections underneath former president Donald Trump — have performed in leaving the Okefenokee so weak.
When Georgia regulators issued the draft permits for the mine, additionally they allowed 60 days for the general public to remark. After April 9, the ultimate permits could possibly be issued, and Twin Pines might start operations. Within the meantime, efforts to defeat the mine have shifted into an even higher gear.
The Nationwide Park Service has nominated the Okefenokee refuge as a UNESCO World Heritage site, a distinction that, if granted, would convey extra guests to the realm — and extra scrutiny to Georgia’s administration of the swamp.
Officers on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have knowledgeable Georgia regulators that the company is formally asserting federal rights over waters that have an effect on the Okefenokee. “Disruption to the pure movement of groundwater on this interconnected system might have far-reaching penalties for each the Refuge and surrounding areas,” wrote Mike Oetker, the performing Southeast regional director of the company.
A brand new invoice earlier than the Georgia Home of Representatives — which the Georgia Conservancy supports — would name a moratorium on new allow functions for mineral mines utilizing the tactic that Twin Pines plans to make use of at Path Ridge. If handed by each the Home and Senate and signed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp earlier than the tip of the legislative session on March 28, the new bill would successfully flip the primary section of the Twin Pines mine right into a pilot web site, stopping the corporate from increasing mining operations till scientists have had time to collect information and assess the mine’s impression on the swamp. The Home is ready to vote on Tuesday.
In a digital public assembly attended by lots of of individuals earlier this month, commenters spoke for three hours in protection of the swamp. (Nobody spoke in favor of the mine.) “There’s simply no sense in risking the (Okefenokee) Nationwide Wildlife Refuge simply to make wealthy folks richer by mining for a particularly nonessential mineral,” one native resident mentioned.
There’s no sense in it in any respect. To construct a mine on the sting of the Okefenokee can be to rob close by Georgians of secure ingesting water, to rob our wild neighbors of one of many few actually wild locations we now have left, and to rob the world of an ecological treasure. The Okefenokee doesn’t belong to Georgia. It belongs to the planet. It belongs to us. And we should always all do every part in our energy to put it aside.
To touch upon the proposed mine by April 9, e mail TwinPines.Comment@dnr.ga.gov or ship a letter to the Land Safety Department, 4244 Worldwide Parkway, Atlanta Tradeport Suite 104, Atlanta, GA 30354. It’s not essential to dwell in Georgia to remark.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion author, is the creator of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
